Pancakes!

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I got the most intense craving on Monday night — sitting on the couch around dinnertime with my laptop, on Round 3 of 3 of my work for that day (with the Yarn Crawl coming up and big things in the works for my businesses, my days tend to consist of work-before-work, work-during-work, and work-after-work) — for pancakes.  Not, like, I want to eat pancakes in the morning and I can’t wait, but I want to eat pancakes right now, for dinner.

You probably know by now that I am a slave to my cravings, and so, that’s what I had for dinner on Monday night.  So weird!  I didn’t even want anything else…just pancakes.  So, I whipped up my go-to recipe, adapted from Alice Waters’ Art of Simple Cooking (adapted mostly meaning that I don’t do any extra steps like separating eggs, mixing ingredients separately…it just all goes into the same bowl, whisked together.  They still turn out great).

  • 3/4c white flour
  • 3/4c brown rice flour
  • 1t baking powder
  • 1t baking soda
  • 1t salt
  • 2 eggs
  • 1c buttermilk
  • 3/4c yogurt (I just happened to have some lemon-honey Greek yogurt on hand that I got last week on super sale at Grocery Outlet…there could not have been a better ingredient on my fridge to use here)

pancakes

This obviously makes enough batter for tons and tons of pancakes, and I only wanted, like, three.  So I funneled the rest into an old Santa Cruz juice jar, which as it turns out is the perfect vessel for pouring perfect little pancakes out of without any mess at all.

pancakes

This is now nestled in our fridge and I’ve been eating delicious, nearly-instant pancakes all week long — with eggs and bacon (indulgent weekend breakfast), with cottage cheese (healthy weekday breakfast), and with homemade lemon curd and more of that honey-lemon Greek yogurt (dessert)!

pancakes


Gnocchi with Mushroom Ragu and Stuffed Chickpea Crepes

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I set out this week to make this recipe for gnocchi with mushroom ragu — the meal was actually inspired by a package of gnocchi I got a killer deal on last week, so I used store-bought instead of the homemade version in that recipe.  Homemade gnocchi always seems like an unnecessary pain.  If I’m going to waste some calories on empty potato starch, it had better be becasue it makes for an easy weeknight meal and only takes 5 minutes to cook!  I’ll save labor-intensive for if I ever decide to make my own fettucine.chickpea crepes and gnocchi with mushroom ragu

The recipe for the mushroom ragu is so dang simple I don’t really know what I can say about it.  I bought a pound of delicious mushrooms at the Portland Fruit Company, sauteed them with butter and garlic and a teaspoon of homemade rub that was a Christmas gift from one of our friends this year, then added wine and stock (didn’t have any thyme), and a few teaspoons of corn starch to thicken it up.  Then topped it off with some fresh lemon juice and cream!

A pound of mushrooms really doesn’t make a whole lot of sauce once it cooks down — just enough to liberally cover two small servings of gnocchi, which was only about half the package — the rest will get turned into something else later in the week!  Oh, but after cooking the gnocchi in boiling water and straining them, I did fry them up in some coconut oil on the stovetop so they were nice and toothy.

This would never have been enough food for Jesse “I’m a growing boy” Hanson’s dinner, so fortunately I had pulled this recipe for chickpea crepes from my Pinterest to try out for this week.  I would never think of crepes as being particularly filling, but since these are made entirely with chickpea flour, they actually packed a pretty filling punch and made for great little handheld shells in which to make mini DIY salad tacos.

The crepes are super easy.  You just mix up all the following ingredients in a bowl, and let it sit while you prep the rest of the meal:

  • 1 1/3c chickpea flour
  • 1c water (I added more so that the pancakes would be thinner)
  • 1/2 jalapeno
  • 1 inch ginger, grated
  • 1c chopped cilantro
  • 2t salt
  • 1t cayenne

After whisking those together and letting it sit, I added more water until it was the consistency I wanted — like pancake batter.  I heated up some coconut oil in our skillet and made these pancakes one ladle-ful at a time, letting them cook most of the way through on one side, then flipping them momentarily to finish them off.  Our skillet has a pretty nice patina at this point so I didn’t have to re-oil the pan more than once or twice.

By the end, I had a big plate full of these protein-y, filling, spicy, savory crepes, which were served DIY-style, each of us adding our own ratio of salad greens, leftover black beans, green onions, and dressing (choices were lemon-tahini-yogurt, or garlic-dijon-vinaigrette) as the filling and eating them taco-style with our hands.  Delish!

chickpea crepes and gnocchi with mushroom ragu


Cheesy Polenta, Black Beans, Garlic Spinach, and a Poached Egg

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This was a perfect Monday night meal, inspired by this post on the Kitchn.  I love how, despite the four multiple components to this meal (which totally goes against my propensity for one-pot dinners!), everything cooks in the right order and gives you time to prep the next thing while you leave the current one to boil/simmer/saute, and it really does come together perfectly at the end.

The real shining star that made this meal so healthy and delish was the black beans, which I subbed in for the chicken sausage.  I had a long meeting on Monday morning and came home afterwards to finish up my work for the day at home, which meant I was home early enough to get this started — a luxury that most probably don’t have, but that’s the small biz owner tradeoff for late nights, early mornings, and unbridled stress.

Jesse had dutifully cleaned up after a little Super Bowl party that he threw here the day before, so our Dutch oven was sparkling clean and in perfect shape for the job.  I started by sauteeing an entire chopped onion in some leftover bacon fat in the bottom of the Dutch oven, along with 4 cloves of smashed garlic.  After a few minutes I added 2 cups of dried black beans, covered with water, and brought that all to a boil with a bay leaf, a teaspoon of salt, 1/4 teaspoon of chili powder, and some chopped up leftover charred poblano peppers that I had in the fridge from last week when I made us cheesy shrimp-stuffed peppers for dinner.  After bringing this all to a boil, I then turned everything off and let it all sit on the stove for the rest of the afternoon, not touching it again until later that night when I came home from a long run, when I brought it back to a boil and then let it simmer for about 40 minutes, with the lid slightly ajar.  (The sitting all afternoon effectively was me soaking the beans, just in a more complicated water.)

Cheesy Polenta Bowl

While the beans were simmering, I started the polenta, bringing 3 cups of water and 1 cup of milk to a boil together in a pot on the stove.  Once it started boiling, I whisked in 1 cup of polenta and 1 teaspoon of salt, covered, and simmered — whisking every few minutes to prevent clumping.  Once it had thickened, I added a big handful of shredded cheddar to the pot and stirred it in until it had incorporated.  I usually save polenta for nights like these, when Jesse does his own thing for dinner and I can experiment with foods I don’t think he’ll particularly like.  But after making polenta like this, I kind of feel like I need to force him to give it another go.  When you make polenta with this much cheese and milk, I kind of feel like anyone who loves macaroni and cheese, has to love this, too.

Cheesy Polenta Bowl

While that polenta was in its last stages of thickening, I got started on the spinach — but we also had a yam that’s been sitting around for awhile, so I chopped half of that up into little cubes and pan fried them first.  Once the yam was pretty well cooked, I added a chopped shallot, 3 cloves of pressed garlic, and a giant bunch of fresh spinach, chopped, to the skillet.  Once the spinach was perfectly wilted, I removed it from the heat.

Cheesy Polenta Bowl

Right about when I threw in the spinach, shallot and garlic, I also brought a small little saucepan of water toa boil on the adjacent burner with a spoonful of vinegar, to poach this egg.  Once the water was at a low simmering boil, I cracked the egg into the water, careful not to break the yolk, and set my timer for 4 minutes.  I think 4.5 minutes is perfect for a poached egg, so once I hear the timer go off, this gives me just enough time to find a spoon to fish it out with, assemble my bowl with all the components (polenta, beans, and spinach), and head back to the stove to place the egg on top as the crowning jewel.

Cheesy Polenta Bowl

I’m into it.